Monday, July 14, 2014

This 2-disc set covers the (almost) complete musical 5-year
legacy of the Swiss, mostly-female art-punk group Kleenex (who in 1980 changed
their name to Liliput to avoid a lawsuit from a certain facial tissue manufacturer
who shall remain nameless). It goes from their early 1978 punk-ish works
through various lineup changes, two full-length LPs and a number of EPs,
singles, and stray tracks until their dissolution in 1983. In 46 songs born out
of the music scene of a 70’s post-punk Zurich, the band explored a brand of
punk-inspired music that’s unlike anything else out there, including similarly
structured, arty, all-female bands of the era like The Slits and The Raincoats,
both of whom aren’t – in my humble opinion – up to their standards. Not that it
needs to be a competition of course – you need The Slits’ Cut and The
Raincoats’ The Raincoats and maybe Odyshape too (and possibly
Essential Logic’s Beat Rhythm News too), but you definitely need this
more than any of them.

The group
writes with the purity of the best punk rockers – not knowing the rules of
music allows you to break them in interesting and creative ways – and it’s one
of the main reasons their music resembles nothing else out there. Songs are
sung primarily in English, sometimes Swiss-German, and very occasionally in
French, though often (in any language) with more care to the sound than the
sense of words. According to guitarist Marlene Marder:

“Our English isn't that good. It's
a foreign language. It was nonsense anyway! (laughs) We had one or two songs in
German. ... For us, English was the language of music but we couldn't talk
English so... We tried.” (From interview in Perfect Sound Forever online
magazine, May 1998 (http://www.furious.com/perfect/kleenex.html)

So these women proffer shouts,
sing-alongs, and eccentric vocal interjections and sounds over their crudely
catchy tunes, leaving something always slightly off and creepy even in their
whimsy, a dark undercurrent even to the lightest sounding material. Covering
their full output requires viewing the different lineups through different
lenses, so let’s break it down like this:

Their earliest recordings, punkier
than they’d be later, finding them hitting their stride with the great “Krimi”
and “Beri-Beri.” Voices joining on “Ain’t You” or the German-language “Nice” is
about as “girl group” as this punk-inspired (mostly) female group really got.

A different vibe, and not just
because of the saxophone. It’s clear they’re gunning for both artier and
goofier waters than most punk bands – as signified in the whistle-along of “Die
Matrosen” - but they don’t lose their oddball catchiness, as in that whistle-along
or the cut that follows, “Hitch-Hike” (no relation to the Marvin Gaye classic).

A single immediately noticeable as
different from the others for its heavy riffing on “Eisiger Wind” though true
to their style it creates its own form rather than following any proscribed
hard rock models, breaking into their usual vocal harmonic excursions; the flip
side “When the Cat’s Away” is a whimsical waltz with an undercurrent of menace.

Artier that anything they’d yet
essayed, this is their first full album (Liliput), and for me the high
point of their career. Weird vocal sounds, percussive experimentation, scraped
violin playing the part of a bird, primordial dinosaur vocals – it’s all over
the place and yet unified by their spirit, indulging their sense of fun, their
sense of musical drama. Their playing is also upped a notch from the looser earlier
material without losing their raw edge. The primordial “Umamm,” the atmospheric
“Tschik-mo,” the percussion-and-vocals closing cut “Tong Tong” (with its sole
lyric of “tong tong” repeated over and over), the vaguely jazzy “Ichor,” and
maybe their by-now-patented vocal outbursts all over “Outburst” are my personal
highlights, but the whole record kills. Marlene again:

One single plus one album (Some
Songs). Single is two great, catchy sides (especially “You Did It”), the
album their most polished – if that can ever be said of the group – and rocking
statement to date, though even here they don’t lose the qualities that make the
band so special.

And so it went. Astrid Spirit, the
main driving force for keeping the band together as a potential career at this
point became pregnant and decided to devote her full energies to her child
rather than her group and founders Marder and Schiff were ready to move on with
their lives. But they left behind five wonderful years of music that even 30-35
years later sound utterly unique.